Mel Brooks' The Producers (1967)

It's time for another "Film Club Dialogue," tonight featuring Miriam Tibbets, Film Club's own Anarchist and Film Club's adviser, Mr. Findlay. Tonight's topic: cult films.

Miriam: Why are cult movies considered “cult”?

Findlay: Um, because they band together and practice strange rituals at midnight?

M: Maybe, but Wikipedia says it’s because of their dedicated fanbase, an elaborate subculture that engages in repeated viewings, quotes dialogue, and participates in some form audience participation.

F: Like when people throw rice and toilet paper and shout rude things at the screen during The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

M: That too.

F: So it’s the audience that acts like a cult, not the movie. But what does this have to do with tonight’s movie The Producers by Mel Brooks?

M: How could The Producers not be cult film? Any film whose plot includes a washed-up Broadway producer (played by Zero Mostel) and a nebbishy accountant (played by Gene Wilder) creating a musical called “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” deserves the esteemed title of “cult.”

F: So, does the audience participate? I’m not sure I want to see a bunch of high school students singing and dancing along to “Springtime for Hitler” or dressing up as Nazis. Even if it is a comedy.

M: The Producers made my father sing out “Springtime for Hitler” at the very mention of this movie.

F: No doubt your father sings along with a lot of movies. Has he seen Mulan?

M: Maybe; we’re getting off topic. Cult films also have a status that places them outside the mainstream. They’re movies that are overlooked by most people, even as they become hugely popular with a small “in-group.” They also tend to have story elements that challenge mainstream values.

F: Ah, like the movies of John Waters, most of which we can’t show at Movie Night. But wasn’t The Producers fairly popular?

M: Yes, it was. Many critics, who usually disregard movies that later achieve cult status, celebrated Mel Brook’s comedy. But it does approach a serious topic with a kind of humor that a lot of people might find offensive.

F: Like making a musical about Hitler.

M: To quote the movie, “Not many know it, but the Fuhrer was a terrific dancer.”

F: Now that’s funny.

M: I’m a huge fan of satire and black comedy, the sort of elements one often finds in a cult movie.

F: Sure. That reminds me of one of my favorite cult films, Eating Raoul. It’s about a dinner party, and I’ll let you guess who’s for dinner.

M: Ewww.

[Pause]

F: I think there's another really important aspect of the cult film definition we haven't talked about.

M: What's that?

F: "Camp." Typically this refers to the mocking of conventional values. More specifically, camp art attacks "straight" values with a homoerotic subtext.

M: Are we still talking about The Producers?

F: Well, yes. But a more familiar example might be the 1960s Batman movie which we showed last year.That depiction of the Batman character is frequently described as "campy" because its presentation of a male superhero who speaks in decisive exclamation points in such an over-the-top comic manner calls into question the conventional attitudes about manliness. Just look at his tights, his eyebrows painted onto his cowl, Robin's cute little slippers.

M: Right. And The Producers has the same kind of subtext. The flamboyant effeminacy of the character, L. S. D., and the whole "Springtime for Hitler" show, in fact.

F: Exactly. That's campy. And that's a key component of a lot of cult films. For an odd comedy about a couple of guys trying to make a terrible Broadway musical, The Producers has enjoyed a pretty long life. It got made into an actual Broadway musical in 2001, and then that got made into a new film musical in 2005.

M: Raising another question: Why do people insist on remaking movies already held in high regard?

F: Maybe film-makers in the 21^st century have run out of ideas. Or they just know it’s easy to make money when you give the film-goer something familiar.

M: Well, enjoy this original version of the movie. And join the cult, too, for heaven’s sake! We sacrifice goats to Mel Gibson at sunset.

Miriam Tibbets (Film Club Anarchist) and R. Findlay (Film Club Adviser)

Mel Stuart's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Film Club’s theme for Movie Night this year is “originals.” That is, movies that were later remade into versions that, for younger viewers, have become more familiar then first. For example, raise your hand if you’ve seen both Peter Jackson's King Kong AND the original King Kong from 1933 or the Coen Brothers' Academy Award-winning True Grit AND the original True Grit from 1969 (with John Wayne). We were pretty intrigued by the idea of seeing these classics. What major differences would emerge? Would technology, or culture, or narrative be the most re-worked element? What made the original so entertaining or flawed that film-makers were compelled to make another one? And the more we talked about it, the more I got the sense that we were chalking this cannibalization of movie stories up to a typical Hollywood maneuver, one usually have to do with economics.

But it’s not. Telling stories, repeating them, adapting them, changing them, blending them with other stories – this is what we humans do, and we’ve done it for millennia. For example, Shakespeare’s plays are reworked versions of older stories. All three of the major Greek tragedians tell versions of the Orestes and Electra myth within a few decades of each other. More recently, Rick Riordan has been updating Greek myths for new readers. We love familiar stories, and we love to hear them with new twists. And sometimes because we love them, we want a small piece that makes us uncomfortable to be changed, so we can go on loving them.

In a trivial example of this, in 2005, HarperCollins, the publisher of the children's classic Goodnight Moon, decided to remove, from a picture that had long adorned the back of the book, the cigarette from illustrator Clement Hurd's fingers, using the magic of PhotoShop. "It [was] potentially a harmful message to very young kids," publisher Kate Jackson told the New York Times at the time. A significant outcry against changing what amounted to a historical document forced HarperCollins to reconsider.

So it may or may not surprise you to find out that there are two versions, an original and a revised, of Roald Dahl’s children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from which tonight’s movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, comes. The change is a small one, but it’s significant. And it has to do with the Oompa-Loompas, those endearing little people who live and work in Willy Wonka’s famous chocolate factory. Dahl published his book, originally, in 1964. The introduction and description of the Oompa-Loompas goes like this:

Children and parents alike rushed down to the edge of the river to get a close look.
“Aren’t they fantastic!”
"No higher than my knee!"
“Their skin is almost black.” 

At this point there is some incredulity about their size. Mike Teavee doesn’t believe any real person could be so small. And Mr. Wonka points out that the Oompa-Loompas are, in fact, pygmies (as in Faith Jacques original illustrations):

Pygmies they are! Imported direct form Africa! They belong to a tribe of tiny miniature pygmies known as the Oompa-Loompas. I discovered them myself. I brought them over from Africa myself -- the whole tribe of them, three thousand in all. I found them in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before. They were living in tree-houses. They had to live in tree houses, otherwise, being so small, they would have been gobbled up by every animal in the jungle. And when I found them, they were practically starving to death. ... Poor little Oompa-Loompas!

When Mel Stuart began work on the film version that you’re watching tonight, there was some concern about controversial issues. If you read the passages that follow the original description of the pygmies, you’ll notice right away the stereotypes that have become associated with racist or imperialist imagery: A culture of struggling little natives rescued by a benevolent (white) European, easily adapted to entertainment (“They love singing and dancing. They are always making up songs”), still retaining elements of its "primitivism" ("they still wear the same kind of clothes they wore in the jungle  ... the women wear leaves, and the children wear nothing at all"), and who seem to have no problem with their indenture in a factory.

The studio wanted to ensure that the film was enjoyed by all and, as you will notice, they eliminated the pygmy look and replaced it with the now-distinctive orange and green Oompa-Loompa. Dahl followed suit in a revision of the book in 1974. The passages quoted above were replaced. Instead of Africa, the Oompa-Loompas now came from “Loompaland,” the existence of which is denied by Mrs. Salt. Mr. Wonka begs to differ and retorts:

What a terrible country it is! Nothing but thick jungles infested by the most dangerous beasts in the entire world – hornswogglers and snozzwangers and those terrible wicked whangdoodles. A whangdoodle would eat ten Oompa-Loompas for breakfast and come galloping back for a second helping. When I went out there I found the little Oompa-Loompas living in tree-houses.

The fantasy tone of the revised version echoes the fantasy of a magic chocolate factory, and few people challenged the changes. As revised fantasy Loompalanders, we’re less likely to criticize this depiction, which is retained in the revision, and echoed in Quentin Blake's 1998 illustrations for the book (right). Dahl explained the change this way:

"I created a group of little fantasy creatures ... I saw them as charming creatures, whereas the white kids in the books were ... most unpleasant. It didn't occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was racist, but it did occur to the NAACP and others ... After listening to the criticisms, I found myself sympathizing with them, which is why I revised the book."

This is not to say that Dahl is a racist, or that remakes and revisions exist to correct errors or weaknesses of the past. Dahl came from a time and a place still recovering from an intensely imperial (and imperialistic) past.

And that’s an interesting thing about originals – the window they open to earlier cultures. We get to look at a familiar story, but reflect on the unique way in which the story is told. You’re watching a movie tonight, one with orange Oompa-Loompas and a Willy Wonka definitely not played by Johnny Depp but by Gene Wilder. What elements of 1960s culture do you see built into the story? What elements stay the same? Whatever you notice, you’ll enjoy the riotous, sarcastic, deadpan entertainment of this version of Dahl’s story.

R. Findlay
Film Club adviser

Allan Arkush's Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979)

No essay available at this time.

Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

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Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1990)

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Robert Kenner's Food, Inc. (2008)

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George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973)

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Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002)

In honor of the Lunar New Year, we leave our teenage angst perspective for one with a different color, a foreign taste. Enter our Eastern friends with Chinese kung fu. When exploring the realm of martial arts, the first noticeable trait that the eye catches is no doubt how ridiculous these actors look flying in the air with their unrealistic swordsmanship. In fact, Hero is an entire spectacle of ridiculous notions. From a warrior warding off thousands of arrows with nothing but her sleeves to a battle taking place solely on water, Hero upholds the standard that has somehow become essential to any kung fu movie.

I used to hate that about my favorite Asian films. As a child, my movie was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I worshipped every scene and every score of music as if I was its creator. Frankly I still do, and I cringe whenever I hear someone talking about it as if it was just another movie. It lures me in with an intense and emotional pull that I cannot describe other than nostalgia. But one day (the first and last), I decided to share this personal treasure of mine with a friend who had never seen the film. The only reaction from her was laughter. For how could anyone take a movie like this seriously, where people are ricocheting off roofs and balancing on bamboo trees?!

I used to think that this ridiculous aspect took away from the important themes and lessons that one can find in a martial arts film. But honestly, the immense fakeness is necessary. It is a mirror of ourselves as people, who do ridiculously evil things to each other all of the time as nations, as races, and as opposites (who are not as opposite as we think).

If you are new to the martial arts scene, I suggest Hero as the perfect starting point because it exquisitely incorporates the inescapable sense of hysterics with the realization of deep morals. This may seem like an odd pairing to put together in a movie, but is perfectly balanced with an immense and indescribable beauty that renowned director Zhang Yimou has once again created. It may then be surprising to learn that the most beautiful movie I have ever laid eyes on is about nothing but war. Let me explain.

Hero takes place during a time in China’s history when the warring states were still struggling for control over one another. Though it is a period film, the movie’s underlying messages transcend any time or culture barriers because it is about war, an ugly complex that humanity fails to avoid again and again. War is the dirty little secret behind civilization and remains an inescapable truth throughout world history. And because death is a part of life, it is also beautiful in its twistingly human way. Hero magnifies that beauty and morphs the crude nature of humanity into a simple lesson of morals. Movie reviewer Roger Ebert states that it is violent only incidentally. But perhaps the movie suggests that violence itself is incidental in the grander scheme of understanding ourselves.

Peace and honor are hard words to take seriously in our time and society. Laughable even. Possibly the root to why kung fu movies seem so ridiculous. But for me at least, this movie brought back the inspiration that is hidden in these concepts. If anything, watch Hero to fall back in love with the romanticism behind honoring one’s country or with the primitive instinct to put your love over yourself. Watch the movie for the colors, the cinematography, the music, everything that is so brilliantly put together in order to give us a sense of who we are and how we can learn to do the right thing.

Gina Nguyen
Guest Commentator

Michael Verhoeven's The Nasty Girl (1990)

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Leslie Martinson's Batman (1966)

Tonight we're showing Batman, the movie. But it's probably not what you think. When we think about Batman movies these days, we make a variety of assumptions without knowing it -- what kind of costume he wears, the reality of the world he exists in and the darkness of that world, a certain bleak aesthetic that goes hand in hand with the mythology. This current impression exists because the popular culture vision of Batman changed, drastically, in 1986. That was the year that Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” (originally published in three volumes) came out. Prior to that, Batman was firmly in comic book mode – he fought outlandish costumed villains or two-bit criminals, worked in a absolutely moral, though slightly ironic, universe (good, evil, little in between), and faced the frequent simplicity and looniness of comic narrative with a persistent straight face. It was the stuff of juvenile fantasy. Yes, the 1970s saw the rise of more realistic art in comic books. Neal Adams, and a handful of other illustrators, located DC and Marvel heroes in a much more detailed, recognizable world and added powerful detail to their illustrations. But the two-dimensional simplicity of the stories for the most part stayed intact.

Then Frank Miller gave us the “Dark Knight.” If you haven’t read that story, it’s set in the near future. Batman is 55, battle-scarred, thought by many to be dead. Punks, disorder, corruption rule the city (and make you wonder if Batman ever had any effect on Gotham’s crime rate). The comic’s real villain is moral decay, and Batman’s role is decidedly ambiguous. He even fights Superman, who comes off as a government stooge. The villains are not just evil, but dangerous. So Miller shifted the emphasis from fantasy (superheroes fight and beat the metaphorical representatives of social disorder) to post-modernist social commentary (superhero fights monsters in stories that reveal our own cultural id).

To completely understand the effect of DKR, you only have to look at the Batman stories of the next few years. In 1988, DC released two comics, “The Killing Joke” in which the Joker shoots and paralyzes Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, and “A Death in the Family,” in which the Joker beats the second Robin, Jason Todd, to death with a crowbar. The Dark Knight effect, then, was to move Batman into a darker universe, an ugly world, both in atmosphere and in antagonist, that is not easily conquered.

And in 1989, Tim Burton released the first of his Batman movies, starring Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Burton fully embraced the dark and gothic aspect of the character lurking within the more recent, malevolent, storylines. Making effective use of the ominous, looming architecture of production designer Anton Furst, Burton created a cast of grotesques, who got even more grotesque in Batman Returns (1992), sinking the viewer into a disturbing slough of psychosis and the dark, seamy side of life. Think: Burton’s Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) whose vinyl outfit screams dominatrix, while the outfit’s ever-present stitching suggests metaphorically the scars on her soul.

Burton was followed by Schumacher (Batman Forever with Val Kilmer and Batman and Robin with George Clooney) and then Nolan (the current Batman trilogy with Christian Bale). But whether gothic grotesque or Freudian chic or pessimistic realism, all these Batmen are dark, violent, oppressive, and tortured.

And all of them are 180 degrees and worlds away from Leslie Martinson’s 1966 offering, a movie made using the cast and concepts of the concurrent Batman TV show. What you’re seeing tonight is not only not recognizable in the current Batman scheme, it’s hard to figure out where it came from; it’s that alien. But the word we attach to it is “camp.” First of all, it treats the comic book origins of Batman as just that – comic. Second, it presents Batman in an ironic mode of deadpan self-mockery. It’s like the movie is one giant in-joke. Nobody actually acts like this, the movie suggests, but we’re going to pretend that it’s all perfectly normal. The more outrageous the character, situation, language, the more normal we’re going to pretend it is. Doesn’t everyone scale the sides of buildings with a thin rope when they could take an elevator? Doesn’t everyone have a spray can of Shark Repellent Bat Spray in the bathroom cupboard? Doesn’t every country have a navy surplus submarine fitted with duck-foot-like stabilizers and a periscope in a penguin head? Of course these things exist! And Batman (Adam West) and Robin (Burt Ward) think nothing of their oddity, even as they speak in sentences that end exclusively in exclamation points.

One thing I really like about this movie is how the production designers (Serge Krizman and Jack Martin Smith) went back to the original comic books’ 4-color printing process: yellow, magenta, cyan (blue), and black. Batman’s costume is gray. This cape is blue, as is Bruce Wayne’s hair. All the colors in a comic book are based on what variations, with tinting and combinations of tints, can be made with those four colors, a palette of 64 colors to be exact. And the movie stays pretty true to that palette in invoking the original comic look.

Look also for the cinematographer’s (Howard Schwartz) frequent use of the “dutch angle,” where the camera is tilted so that world on screen looks tilted too. Batman uses this technique when depicting the villains, whose world is, metaphorically, crooked.

So there’s a ton of fun to be had watching this very comic-book version of the movie. And it’s a perfect antidote to the more recent seven dark and depressing versions of the character we’ve had since 1989. In fact, you might think a bit about how these different versions of Batman reflect, a lot, the cultures in which they’re created. And then ask yourself: in which “world” do you most want to live?

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1999)

I was riding down the sunny streets of New York City on a motorcycle. As I sped toward Times Square, the former owner of my new bike’s parents shuttered through my mind: I wondered what their reaction would be when they found out that their son had just been murdered for his Tetsuo brand motorcycle. The thought passed, and I kept riding.

It wasn’t the first homicide I had committed that day. Just minutes earlier, I aimed the barrel of my gun at a propane tank parked at a fueling station and pulled the trigger. I wasn’t able to count the bodies before I could get away from the Five-O on the unidentified man’s Tetsuo bike, the same who lay dead on the pavement in the middle of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

The cops were catching up to me now. Fifty, sixty, seventy the speedometer read. I was the Minnesota cowboy who could not be caught; something in my teetering bulb of dread and dream knew I would never be. And so I killed again

The police were cut off by a walk only street in Greenwich Village. My newly hijacked motorcycle, a Kaneda model, was acquired from an Eastern European gentleman below an underpass off of Highway 78 running alongside the Hudson River. The man’s neck snapped sharply between my fingerless leather gloves. It was the last noise his body would ever make as his legs twitched silently beneath my feet. Sirens blared. This time, I didn’t have enough time to think about his parents.

I raced down the east end of Broadway St, weaving in between a combination of pedestrians, limos, and pigeons. A police officer flew out his windshield into oncoming traffic behind me, sporadically bouncing across the concrete safari of the city for blocks. I knew an acquaintance would be waiting in Brooklyn with a chopper to take us out of the sights and minds of the NYPD, but it would take more than a motorcycle to get there.

I headed for the docks on the Lower East Side, where I might be able to hijack a jet ski to take across East River into the borough to the south. The plot thickened when I tried to pass the SWAT teams on South Essex Street, where spotlights blinded and helicopters deafened. I was about to finally be roped in. The tires of my Kaneda were shot out by a rooftop sniper. For a moment, I flew. The next, I lay dead.

The masochistic nature of my killing spree in Grand Theft Auto IV left me thinking about those motorcycles I rode in my final hour of play. I suspected the names were Japanese, and I knew for a fact that they were fictitious.

Fictitious, but not original. A Google search took me to a character list for an animated film called Akira. Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, branded their virtual motorcycles under the veil of an Easter egg, the names of Akira’s central characters.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg labeled the film unmarketable in the United States, but Akira managed to achieve cult status after its national 2001 release.

Tetsuo and Kaneda are cyberpunk motorcycle gangsters, members of a society described as “low life and high technology.” Akira has an advantage over live action films in the genre in that the special effects options that went into making a dystopian Tokyo circa 2019 were limitless in its art form.

Akira is much praised as an animated cult movie that managed to influence live-action blockbusters. The Matrix (1999) drew from Akira’s account of a human’s attempt to do right in a corrupt, technology-based society, a remarkable feat for a film without any actors. Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA looked to director Katsuhiro Otomo’s methods of audio engineering when creating the sound effects for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), compositing the noise produced by a 1929 Harley Davidson with that of a jet engine.

Word of a live-action remake of Akira arises in the media every so often. Warner Brothers Studios bought the rights in 2008, and the various proposed cast lists have been exclusively white A-List: Ryan Gosling and James Franco as the leads, Mila Kunis as femme fatale, Helena Bonham Carter typecast as the villain. No deals between the studio and the actors were ever secured, and production has shut down a total of four times as of January 2012. It’s better that way. The power of Otomo’s storytelling with the animated art form is timeless.

Watch for the respect Kaneda gives his brethren in light of their losses, dissimilar from the respect I failed to give my victims back in my Grand Theft Auto IV days. Hayao Miyazaki fanboys could never stomach the violence you are about to witness.

August King
Film Club Co-President

Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995)

In 1995, when the film Clueless first hit the big screens, I was only one year old. That being said, when I reached the proper age of 12, Clueless seemed to tell me all I needed to know about high-school. My pre-teen friends and I would all gather at slumber parties and pick out Clueless from amongst the 12 video cassettes of Mary-Kate and Ashley fun high-school adventures. After a while, Alicia Silverstone as Cher joined the many other valley-pop girl icons that embraced the MTV scene.

But what made the film Clueless so appealing to a variety of mid-western pre-teen girls in the early 2000s was the idea that Cher was the perfect West Hollywood girl. In a sense, Cher is strong. She is determined and passionate to say the least. She takes care of others and is considerate of the welfare her friends and teachers, to her own benefit in some cases. Either way, to a pre-teen girl Cher kicks high-school in the butt, she is large and in charge, but after a while, as the film unfolds, we see Cher’s perfect high-school world start to unravel.

Watching Clueless again, at the ripe age of eighteen, I am recognize Cher as the outlandish and ... well, clueless ... character that she is, all thanks to writer and director Amy Heckerling. In Mean Girls, writers Tina Fey and Rosalind Wiseman exploit all social groups and stereotypes one might assume true of a common 2004 high school. In essence, Heckerling does the same…she just did it nine years earlier.

In Clueless, Cher encompasses a wide variety of stereotypical women, combining a ‘50s housewife and ‘90s teenage girl. She is a bad driver, conscious of her figure and her fashion – as well as everyone else’s – and suggests that “whenever a boy comes over, you should always have something baking.” But we as an audience feel the exact same way as some of the characters around her; for a good portion of the film we see Cher as a ditzy, blonde, “as if” valley girl whose only direction in life is to the mall. However, what really concerned my slightly feminist mother, who was concerned about my social vulnerability as a twelve-year-old, was the fact in order to be socially successful in high school you always had to be romantically involved with a male counterpart, preferably one of your same popularity or higher. We see Cher thrust this anti-feminist value on her new founded project, Ty.

Cher also embraces the familiar sentiment that she must carry the new, hopeless, and ultimately clueless girl under her wing. This thought falls under the category of “using your popularity as a means for good.” As we saw in Mean Girls where Cady is brought up within the Plastics and in Heathers where “Heather” takes the place of the killed-off Heather Chandler despite her role as a floater. In Clueless, the newest new girl to transform herself is Ty, played by the late Brittany Murphy. Introduced as a “farm girl,” Ty’s popularity suddenly takes shape as Cher shows her the Hollywood ropes. At one point, Ty’s transformation backfires on Cher as Ty for a moment takes away all of Cher’s hard earned attention. “What was happening?” Cher says in a voice-over, “Ty being the most popular girl in school? Was this some sor tof alternate universe? Considering how clueless she was, Ty had the whole damsel in distress thing down.”

What makes this movie so emotionally appealing, to both my pre-teen and adult self, is the fact that Heckerling gives complexity to a character we might normally write off and judge as snobby and annoying. We see the struggles, humorous and heart-wrenching as they may be, unfold throughout this chapter in Cher’s life. Along with Cher and other characters such as Ty, they grow from being clueless teenagers to emotional human beings, just somewhat misunderstood by society.

Liz Rossman
Film Club

Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976)

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Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010)

"Do you think I’ve gone round-the-bend?"
“I’m afraid so. You’re mad, bonkers, off-your head. But I’ll tell you a secret, all the best people are.”

Some of the opening lines of Alice in Wonderland seem to sum up both the film and its creators perfectly. Released in 2010, Alice in Wonderland takes on a new plot thanks to screenwriter Linda Woolverton. But Tim Burton treats the tale as his own. Complete with his whimsical artistic aesthetic, Alice and Wonderland may not be a strong enough film to stand on its own but fits perfectly into Burton’s catalog of films.

The film is set in English Victorian times, with elaborate and fantastic costumes; the “real world” outside of wonderland appears to be a scene out of Brideshead Revisited. Thanks to Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood, the classic tan and pale blue Victorian corsets and petticoats are just as elaborate as the costumes seen in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. In fact, Alice in Wonderland draws on a similar theme – suppressed teenagers within a suppressive aristocratic world – as Marie Antoinette. Uncomfortable with and scornful of anything proper, Alice (played by Mia Waskikowska) wants out of everything relating to arranged marriages and extreme Victorian societal norms. She is an outsider, a Socratic rebel to say the least, always being reminded by others of her place in this world. “I was thinking what it would be like to fly,” Alice says during a posh English party. “Why would you waste your time thinking of impossible things?” exclaims her soon-to-be fiancé.

As we’ve seen in Heathers and Mean Girls, angsty teenage characters are often desperate to escape their own lives. When they finally do, they realize they are just as unhappy as they were before. Alice feels unfulfilled in Wonderland, where her role is set as the slayer of the Jabberwock in order to return peace to Wonderland. Like Veronica, JD, and Cady Heron, it is only at the end of this film that Alice discovers it isn’t where you are that determines whether you’re feeling content and happy despite outside influences and social norms.

Alice in Wonderland finds Burton continuing his exploration of a number of themes and cinematic styles that have become so closely associated with him. The film sheds light on why Burton maybe is one of the great film auteurs of our generation. What Alfred Hitchcock was to the Baby Boomer generation, Burton is to us, the dreamers and people of the XYZ generation. Auteurs like Hitchcock and François Truffaut stuck to what they knew best and rarely ventured outside a film genre. Hitchcock stuck to suspense, thrill, and aloof females. With Burton it’s a somewhat similar story, but instead of suspense there’s animation and this haunting obscure quality to the plot and characters. What Hitchcock achieved with films, such as Vertigo and Psycho, was this amazing feeling of suspense and thrill. With Burton, the audience is thrown into this dream-like world, escaping the somewhat violent and media-frenzy world we experience today. If anything Alice in Wonderland reaffirms Burton's consistent theme of parallel universes. Alice falls down a hole into Wonderland, just as Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas travels through a set of doors in the depth of the words into a universe of Christmas. Or as Victor Van Dort in Corpse Bride travels through this mystical and supernatural portal into the realm of the living dead. Or as Leo Davidson slips through time to a planet of the apes.

What Tim Burton conveys in his films, such as Alice in Wonderland, is an escape from reality into a universe of the wonderful and unthinkable, the impossible even. And sometimes, you need to think a few impossible things. Maybe even before breakfast.

Liz Rossman
British Literature II

Michael Lehmann's Heathers (1989)

Heathers is the first movie that Film Club has shown twice in eight years. Is it the best movie we’ve shown such that it bears repeating? Not necessarily – we think that honor would go to Cidade de Deus (City of God) – but Heathers fits neatly into this year’s theme, The Movies Go to High School, as it did eight years ago, when the theme was Adolescence on Film. And it is an excellent film.

You wouldn’t know it from the box office receipts. Heathers bombed when it opened in 1988, only earning roughly a million dollars (that’s about two million today). Compare that to Mean Girls which earned almost 130 million worldwide in 2004. So what accounts for the continued interest and screenings of Heathers? We would argue that it is a product of its satirical approach to its subject – conformity and cliquishness in the American high school.

If you’re not familiar with the nature of satire, it goes like this. Satire is a literary form that mocks, ridicules, or shames the behaviors – foolish, greedy, misguidedly earnest, or otherwise – of people who have power over us and carries that criticism to the society that allows it as well. English teachers often point to Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which the writer suggested, in the 18th century, that the Irish might solve their economic and domestic difficulties if they simply sold their kids to rich people as food. No, he wasn’t serious; he was mocking people’s insensitivity to the impoverished and the ineffective Irish policies that exacerbated the situation.

Heathers takes on a less national political issue and instead focuses on the politics of social groupings within the high school community. In this way, it is very much like Mean Girls, except that because it was made 16 years earlier, we have to say that  Mean Girls  is a lot like Heathers. Whereas Mean Girls exhibits a relatively tame satire, though, Heathers pulls no punches. The Heathers, a triumvirate of social queen bees, is the equivalent of Girls’ Plastics, but not all of them will survive the movie. Mean Girls jokes about killing off the Plastics; Heathers actually does it. And a couple jocks, to boot. And while  Mean Girls attacks cliquishness per se, Heathers goes after social tyranny, homophobia, and the superficiality of judging people by how they look. So people get murdered, schools get blown up, students promote a national suicide day, and everyone says the F-word a lot. From this we come to understand just how undesirable these behaviors are. Satire, see?

Of course, this makes some viewers uncomfortable. In general, mainstream readers, viewers, and art-goers can be fairly literal minded. Satire, by its nature, is outrageous. If you took Heathers literally, you might conclude that it promotes the murder of adolescent jerks. But we at Film Club believe that you are a discerning and sophisticated movie-goer. We believe you can tell the difference between satire and realism. Just in case, we have a little test for you.

Our cartoon tonight is Chuck Jones’s iconic “Rabbit Seasoning,” in which Daffy Duck tries to distract hunter Elmer Fudd from the fact that it is duck hunting season by convincing him it is rabbit season. Bugs deftly and wittily turns the tables on him at every turn, usually resulting in Daffy getting his bill shot off. If you see this cartoon on TV, it is almost certainly edited; all the seconds of violence (a boom and a cloud of smoke around Daffy’s head, then his bill relocated in a place different from where it should be) gone, and with them the punch-line of most of the jokes. It is UNwatchable. But censors have determined that kids watching the cartoon might misunderstand the violence, that they might determine that it’s “okay” to shoot people. Studies support both sides of the issue – children are affected by constant exposure to violence on TV and in video games; children easily distinguish between “cartoon violence” and the real thing. So there’s your test: which are you?

We feel that both “Rabbit Seasoning” and Heathers ask the audience to think (and both use humor to do so). We’d rather have that than the alternative. So enjoy Heathers, but please don’t kill anyone.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser